Pitchfork

It was just a little over a year ago that Nick Sylvester, on this very bandwidth, mused upon the contrast between the Narrator's life-threatening live show and the unfulfilled potential of their Youth City Fire EP. They were a fairly new band, and seemed to be caught between the opposing poles of simpering emo and earsplitting turbo-punk. Such wavering is a severe liability for the EP's shortened format, which requires front-to-back head shots-- all kill no fill.

But whatever indecision plagued the Youth City Fire EP has mostly filtered out of the Narrator's audio onslaught in the course of the intervening year: After the feedback-laden madrigal that comprises the first minute-and-a-half of their debut full-length, the album proper begins with the bang of diesel-fueled chordage, careening drums and brazen shout-along vocals. The Narrator proceeds to subject their riffs and rhythms to a series of spectacular secret grips that hardly relents until the humming dronefest that closes the record, "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRS".

A combination of serrated texture and breakneck intensity is what makes this fairly conventional album stand out: Instead of the shock of the new, it imparts the shock of the awesome, as it's tough to reinvent a wheel that's jamming down a rutted road with redlining RPMs. The violence is pyrotechnically garish, and one pictures bending guitar necks, snapping strings, toppling cymbals, sparking and smoking amps, a sky full of fireworks. For those who miss Up-era Modest Mouse, with their concussive riffs, prickly harmonics, and canting string-bends, Such Triumph will give you a lot to think about on your next long drive.

"Erase the sound!" the singer sneers at the start of "Pregnant Boys", leaping headlong into a total "Shit Luck" lead (note-note-bend, note-note-bend) before the song levels out into a more muscled riff, flexing through unkempt intensity shifts. "Ergot Blues" is a Hot Snakes-style, no-bullshit rave-up that showcases the singer's newfound confidence by putting the vocals high in the mix. The skittering riff on "Roughhousing" hits the sweet spot, and "Now is the Time for All Good Men" lays a staccato telegraph atop tightly coiled melodic lead for a potent hitch-and-glide contrast. "Wait No Actually" and "Wolves in the Walls" are slower numbers that break the momentum in a way that's undesirable, but these feel like vestiges of a former identity crises. Instead of working out the kinks, the Narrator is working them in, and if their next record happens to feature even knottier guitars and more dangerous rhythms, that'd suit me fine.